Jarvis Walker Aurora II 2500 Spinning Reel Part 1

As mentioned in my introductory blog, I'm currently living in the Torres Strait. Thursday Island, to be precise.

View from our bedroom window... not bad, eh?

I'll confess that I hadn't been doing much fishing prior to moving here. I've been living in Canberra for the past eight or so years, where other interests overtook my previous penchant to fish just about every day, or more frequently if possible.

I only moved to Thursday Island in late January 2016, and fish has been on the menu pretty much every day since. I love the lifestyle up here. Sure, it's unrelentingly hot and humid, but the pace of life and close connection to nature suits me.

My fishing gear, however, has not enjoyed the move. One reel that I had for over a decade self-destructed while casting poppers to small GTs and queenfish. My son's reel from a combo gifted to him in mid-2015 has snapped off from the rod while trying to free a snagged lure (this little 2000 size outfit pulled in a 15 kg blacktip shark three weeks before). I'll confess that I also bought two (too?) cheap 5000 size combos before we moved, and the reels aren't doing too well after three months of use and abuse in the boat catching reef fish.

It was worth it, though...

To cut a long story short, both my lure casting reel and my son's reel have now been replaced by a pair of Jarvis Walker Aurora II 2500 spinning reels. These reels boast a 3 bearing system, infinite anti-reverse, stainless steel main shaft, brass pinion gear(s?) and a gear ratio of 5.5:1. They don't boast anything about the drag system and suggest they're designed for mono, rather than braid.

I'll break the suspense, and tell you I got the pair of reels for just $40 each, including free courier shipping. This puts each reel at approximately $15 each without shipping; shockingly cheap by any standards. In fact, thinking back to my first reel purchase, it's the same price, but for a reel of these specs back then, I'd have been paying in the $100-$150 ballpark! Things have come a long way in 20-something years!

Pulling the reel out of the box, the quality doesn't seem too bad. The handle, bail arm and spool are metal, while the rest is the usual graphite-esque plastic found on properly cheap reels. I wish they wouldn't do it, but there's also a chromed plastic piece on the back of the reel that I already know will scratch up and look terrible very quickly.

Turning the handle, it's actually pretty smooth inside the reel, but the knob is one place a bearing is not, and there's already some slight notching in its rotation. I'll be lubing that bit up regularly...

Keeping with the cheap theme, the line that will go on these reels is also from the Jarvis Walker group: Rovex Tergo 20 lb braid. The reel capacity is rated at 210 m of 0.25 mm mono, so the whole 228 m spool of 0.21mm line should be accommodated. *update* After spooling up, it probably only took about 190-200m. No big deal. I also spooled the second reel with Jack Erskine 10X 9 lb mono for comparison.

This reel is going to be mated with a Shimano 4-6 kg graphite rod, which I use for casting plastics and baits to reef fish and trevally up to about 6 kg. I'm hoping it'll deliver enough drag to tire the 3-5 kg trevally and queenfish commonly encountered off the wharf, and the random assortment of emperors, snappers and tuskfish around the reefs.

First field use:
The first field test was done by my faithful assistant (son) Daniel. He still hasn't grasped the concept of minimising slack line on the return, so I was a little interested to see how the reel would cope with loose coils of braid. After all, most people are going to buy these reels for their kids, and there's nothing I despise more than undoing braid tangles while the fish are biting.

The session involved casting soft plastics off the main wharf for trevally and queenfish. The tide was just getting going, running in from low. The current wasn't too strong when we got there, but by nightfall it was gushing through as is commonly observed around Thursday Island. The winning technique was to cast in to the wind and current, let the lure sink to the bottom and do some intermittent twitches. The fish seemed to be concentrated in one little area about 30 m off the wharf, just off the bottom. If you got the cast right, they'd grab the lure on the first twitch, or sometimes even before.

I can happily report that the reel coped fine. There was one big knot of slack-line-induced loops from a whole 2 hours of casting, and it was relatively easy to undo. Here's a pic of the reel after the session:

As you can see, the line's bunched a little at the top and bottom of the spool and sitting quite loose on there. One cast and retrieve under tension will fix that.

Only three fish troubled the reel; the first was on my only turn with it, where I demonstrated that Daniel didn't need to change lure at all, but follow the technique mentioned above. It was only a small bigeye, so not really a test of the gear at all, but all seemed smooth and happy. The other fish were little queenies, which Daniel proudly caught by himself. Not taken with the above mentioned technique, but taken nonetheless.

My conclusion for the night is that the reel's not bad, with no obvious faults that I could point out as yet. I was expecting to at least find something, like the handle nut loosening with use (I've had that with 'mid-range' reels), the drag loosening off by itself or the reel not coping with loose coils of braid being wound on. Nothing. All was well.

A Week in:
As predicted, the handle knob is not up to the task. It started squeaking on the second trip. However, WD40 did the job to quieten it down and make the action smooth again. WD40 is only a very temporary solution though, and I reckon I'll be doing this at least every other weekend...

Also as predicted, the horrible fake chrome is scratched up, revealing the black plastic underneath. No big deal.

A bright spot for the reel is that it doesn't let you wind when it's under load with a decent fish. That's teaching good technique for my kids, so I'm happy about that.

The reel has handled everything we've chucked at it so far, which has just been casting plastics off the wharf for trevally and floating cut baits down the faces of coral reefs. Nothing's really troubled the reel, and the drag has been nice and smooth. The biggest fish landed so far has been by Daniel.

A very proud Dan with a ~4kg gold spot

Not that it's within scope of this review, but I've had a few goes with his outfit, which is spooled with mono. I've concluded that I really don't like mono anymore. Back on topic, the reel handles mono really well; much better than my braid. But Dan hasn't complained about the mono at all, and he's catching plenty of fish with it.

To conclude Part 1, the reel's really not bad. At least, not in the short term. It's smooth, strong enough and seemingly up to the task. Certainly a steal at $20!